Be Excellent To Each Other

Are you a registered iPhone dev kalmar?

I didn't get as far as the Q+A.

Wonder if 02 will support it? If Orange also get to sell the Iphone as rumoured then there might be some market forces at work to make this happen.

I'm guessing it's AT&T in the USA that are dragging their heels, but their whole mobile market is stuck in 1997 anyway.

Yuss. To my shame I didn't know this update was coming until you mentioned it. It's got me all exciticated now though.

Maybe it's a little silly to be excited over the introductions of features other phones have had for ages (MMS and proper Bluetooth) - but I have to say I really am dead chuffed about this now. The iPhone is the first phone I've ever owned that not only am I not bored with a year after getting it (although for convoluted reasons I did recently upgrade to the iPhone 3G) and can find no reason on Earth to replace until something significantly amazing comes along. It really is an awesome little gizmo.

Yeah, I've always been chomping at the bit for a new phone by six months into a contract. I'm now nearly 12 months into this one, and the only phone I want next is the third-gen iPhone.

Sneer away, Grim...!

I've always been bored of my previous phones halfway through he first day of getting them. There was just never anything to do on them; the media players were a joke, the Internet access was a joke, the interface was a joke, the hardware was a joke. Everything was just dull.

This post is brought to you from my iPhone, which I love dearly after six months of constant use.

Yes, well done, your precious phones can almost do as much as most other phones now, and, of course, no others have ever had firmware updates. Hurrah, or something.

They're not going to charge for this though, are they?

I'm mainly talking about not getting bored with a phone after five minutes, rather than this update. I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, really. I've owned one Mac and hardly used it; a couple of iPods I barely used. I love this, though.

No. Also: this is the "fix all those small things everyone moans about" release. To be fair, they have just resolved every issue you've ever brought up except "shit camera" and I reckon that's on the cards for the next hardware revision.

No.

No, they've talked about it - roll on August.
Do iPhones update across the air or do you have to plug them into a PC?

The developer's beta is out now. It's not like they're making this up, is it?

A lot of stuff in this announcement is either APIs that don't do anything on their own or require devs to embed app support. Buzz I'm hearing is that some of the tricks devs are using to speed up text scrolling means copy&paste won't work, so the devs will need to do something different, for example.

Plug in.

You plug it into a Mac.

It updates over iTunes, so I'm guessing you have to plug it in.

How likely is a decent camera given the size constraints though? It's not just a case of throwing megapixels at it, either: it's going to need better glass and a good sensor.

Every megapixel you add also bloats file sizes and slows responsiveness when using the photos app. I would settle for a 3MP model with some better glass and an LED flash.

It'll come quicker than official multitouch support on your G1, that's for sure.

You'd think, but T-Mobile managed to stop the Latitude functionality for the G1 in the last update (for some odd reason).


Gah. What is this, 2005?
On the down side, that does mean I'll have to install iTunes on a PC again


And we all know whose fault that is.

I don't know of any phone that does major OS surgery like this OTA, do you?

A heady mix of the US Patent Office and Apple, but it's the commercial realities of the situation and all Android owners have to suck it up. We'll see what happens with the Pre.

The G1 doesn't interact with a computer at all (at the moment) apart from as a mass storage device.


I hate patents

That's patently obvious.

DYSWIDT?

Well we've proved its as easy to fuck up a quote tag on an iPhone as a G1. Assuming Grim and Doc are both phone posting.

I bet if you go dig in the dev docs, you need to connect to a PC to flash the OS. Every other phone I've used has needed to.

Re: quote tags, I'm actually PC-posting! No excuse.

Actually, I disagree, Blackberry went ahead and did it. It's Google, they're pussies. The software exists, it's just a flag (hacked G1's have turned it on) that Google have to magically say 'go' to. See also: Headphone sockets (without the magic).

Me too, but mine are only rubbish because I'm quoting the Doc's rubbish ones.

Every other phone I've had does too, but the update a couple of weeks ago came across the air, and the big update next month is going to do the same thing.

Not only that but cramming more photosites onto a sensor without increasing its size reduces quality unless you go with better sensor technology, which most hardware versions rarely do.

I've never, ever wished the photos from my iphone were larger in dimension. Maybe I'm alone here. My phone photos are snapshots of occasions used only on the computer; I'd never seriously hope to print them off. Most people use photos entirely for viewing on a computer as well.

Megapixels are worthless.

Moving slightly off-topic, how does copy&paste work on the G1 anyway?

I don't know what any of these updates mean.

The Storm isn't multitouch.

Did I get that wrong? Someone is going through a legal battle over this stuff at the moment, aren't they?

Touch, hold shift, drag-select, release shift, menu (or long-click), copy.
If the screen isn't scrollable, you don't have to hold shift.

Any clues on how they'll do it on an iPhone?

No. Palm are spoiling for a rumble, but that won't happen until the Pre launches.

There's descriptions of the copy and paste mechanisms on the iPhone towards the end of this Macworld coverage

For me, Spotlight is the main plus. And it was such an obvious thing to add, too, what with it being intrinsic to Mac OS X. If it works as well as it does on the desktop, finding and launching apps and accessing content will be simple and fast. That said, I still wish they'd put some kind of app organisation tool into iTunes.

Have we been given a date for the firmware update, then?

Just 'Summer' at the moment.

"Summer". It'll be a late June/early July release with new hardware, I reckon. Do you concur Mr Grannell?

The big G1 update totally wins then, the date for that is 'spring'

I actually kinda wish I'd asked to have a play with your G1 on Sunday now, since I've never actually seen one in the flesh.

The Gaywood said that. You should have said.

I had a quick play with Joans's at the weekend (his G1, too) and it seemed pretty cool. Definitely a worthy alternative to the iPhone.

Roll on the Pre. I'm very happy other firms are stepping up to the plate and stirring up some competition. I hope Apple's patent on multitouch is shot down.

I've had a quick go on a friend's G1, and I was really quite impressed by it - but I still preferred the 'feel' of my iphone.

It's an indictment of the state of handset innovation that it took over a year before anyone had anything like the iPhone on the table.

From, er, 'sources', I've heard there is definitely going to be new hardware in June or July. Absolutely no-one has any idea what that new hardware will be, however. I'm still hoping for a storage bump, maybe some more RAM under the hood, a better camera, longer-lasting battery and fuck-all other changes.


I don't, given that Apple's patent is for very specific things and not for multi-touch as a concept. I'd really hate to see Apple once again fucked over by the competition who just wait for Apple to do something and then copy it, make it worse and make it slightly cheaper.

I have no idea what else they could add. Certainly they won't take anything away (no Nano). Some analyst cockmonkey was ranting about a game-specific device with a d-pad and some buttons but there's zero chance of that on a phone (very slim chance of an iPod with that, I guess, but it would divide the App Store too greatly, so I very much doubt it).

My wildcard bet would be a slate-format device about 3x-4x bigger than an iPhone to address the netbook market, but that wouldn't be an iPhone announcement. I'd say the odds of this are small but non-zero.

Apart from the obvious you state, which basically amount to iPhone 3G++, I don't know what they could or should do. More RAM and a lift of the 22Mb per-app limit would be very nice, but difficult to sell. A bump to 16Gb/32Gb is likely I suppose. None of these modifications sets the world on fire though, which makes me wonder if there's some really neat possibility I am overlooking.

Hmmm. I think it covers pinch-zooming, amongst other things. I reckon it'll harm the industry overall, but I confess to have no read the 80-page heady mix of legalise and tech jargon.